To Sleep, Perchance To Dream
by Downside-Left
Summary: Someone's dream, post-Pain In The Heart Zach/Female-Character-of-Your-Choice . Angst, angst, angst, and more angst! Dark! Creepy!


Disclaimer: The characters and setting and everything not-the-plot does not belong to me. I'm just playin' in the sandboxes.

Title: To Sleep, Perchance To Dream

Summary: Someone's dream, post-Pain In The Heart (Zach/Female-Character-of-Your-Choice). Angst, angst, angst, and more angst! Dark! Creepy!

Rating: T for the occasional f-bomb. And by occasional, I mean frequent. And lots of other swears, too. Plus, it's kind of dark/creepy.

A/N: ZANGST abounds! Heavy-duty ZANGST here. And it's a tad bit disturbing. Although I could be overreacting... but I wrote it late at night, alone, in the dark, after watching Supernatural (which is a REALLY SCARY show when it isn't hilariously funny. And sometimes it's both at once). Lemme know if it's any good, or if it's just a pile of nonsense sprinkled with a garnish of crap. XD

A/N2: Just a note, I do not warn for character death, since I feel like it gives everything away. This note being here does not necessarily mean that there is character death, although there might be. It's now a standard author's note for all my stories, particularly the ZANGST ones. They're the ones that are most likely to involve character death (I think at least one actually had it, or at least hinted at it).

...

They sit quietly on the couch in her apartment, not talking about much of anything. She leans against him, and smiles to herself. Who would've thought that she'd fall so hard for Zach?

If you'd told her a few years ago that she'd be here, she would have laughed in your face.

He shifts a bit, leaning away from her.

She looks up, confused.

He's glaring furiously at her.

"Zach? What's–"

"Don't ask me what's wrong. You know exactly what's wrong," he snaps, coldly angry.

She recoils, slightly afraid. She's never heard this tone of voice from him. "Zach, I don't understand. What are you talking about?"

"You left me there to rot!" He roars, rising to his feet and clenching his hands into fists. "You left me there, alone, in that hell-hole. Did you ever once do a damn thing to help me? No. No, you just went back to your pretty little lab to play with your pretty little toys. And you left me there, alone, to _die_!"

She stands up and moves away from him, terrified. She doesn't understand.

"Did you think I would just… fade away?" he snarls. "Did you think you could just forget me? You can't forget me. You should have seen the warning signs, you stupid bitch."

"What… what warning signs?" she asks, figuring she can just humor him until he calms down.

"After Iraq. I was withdrawn, wasn't I? Even more than before?" he smirks at her, looking as un-Zach-like as possible. "But you just figured I was… tired, right? That, day after fucking day, I was just 'tired', and I'd 'get over it soon'. None of you saw it, did you. None of you saw that I was… slipping."

He holds his hands out, and she tries not to gag. They're drenched in blood.

"I did it, you know. I killed the lobbyist. And I would've eaten him, too," he flicks his tongue across his lips in a gesture worthy of Hannibal Lecter himself. "I would've eaten human flesh, if the Master had wanted me to. If I'd had the chance. Because I _am_ a monster. I became a monster, you fucking bitch, and you could have stopped it, you could have stopped everything if you'd just paid attention for once in your worthless life."

He starts walking towards her, still holding out his blood-soaked hands, and she cannot move. Something is holding her in that spot, and she is terrified.

"I would have gone on killing, you know," he says almost conversationally, but still with that mad glimmer in his eyes. "I would have killed dozens, hundreds, of innocent people. And yet, for some reason, you dream about me. About _being with me_. What does that say about _you_, you worthless whore?"

She tries to flinch away, tries to respond, but she can't.

"If you had just used your damn brain, none of this would have happened. The Master wouldn't have turned me, and maybe this," he gestures to their surroundings, and the blood drips from his hands to the carpet, staining the cream-colored fabric. "Maybe this would be a reality. Instead, it's just your precious little dream."

He grins at her, and her stomach twists into a knot. He's wearing Gormogon's canines-teeth.

"And you know what makes it extra-special sad?" he asks in fake sympathy. "You dream the same dream every night. Every fucking night, we sit there," he waves his hand, and blood splashes across the room, splattering on her furniture. So much blood. "We sit there, and then I turn on you, and then? Then I kill you. I kill you, you fucking bitch, like I should have done in real life. It's your fault, you know. All of this. Everything that happened. You should have seen that something was w_rong_. You should have _stopped it_!"

His blood-stained hands encircle her throat, and she claws at his wrists, staring terrified into his crazed eyes.

"I don't really want to do this, you know," he says quietly as his grip tightens. "But, you see, you failed me. I cannot tolerate failure. You failed to save me. You failed to stop all of this.

"So now you have to die."

She jerks awake, choking back a scream. Then she lurches to her feet, staggers to the bathroom, and throws up what little she managed to get down earlier that evening.

'_Every night, it's the same damn dream,'_ she thinks to herself as she retches into the toilet. _'God, I wish they would fucking stop. Why won't they stop?'_

She knows what Sweets would say. 'Guilty conscience, feeling like you should have been able to stop it, painful feelings of loss.'

'_Well I should have,'_ she reflects. _'I should have seen that something was wrong. I should have….'_

She curls into a ball, leaning against the bathtub, and swipes at her tears.

Objectively speaking, she knows that she couldn't have done anything. That doesn't stop her from drowning in guilt.

She drags herself out of the bathroom and slumps onto the couch, flicking on the TV just to see if there's anything decent on. Anything to delay going back to sleep.

'_Shakespeare is an idiot,'_ she thinks, pausing briefly on the movie _Hamlet_ (the Kenneth Branagh version, not the stupid Ethan Hawke one) in time to hear the line "To sleep, perchance to dream".

'_Dreams are nothing but trouble'._

...

A/N: WOW. Dark. Scary. I creeped myself out writing this! And, once again, _she_ is whichever she you want her to be. _I_ think it's Cam, but you can choose whoever. Also, feel free to change the 'shes' and 'hers' to 'hes' and 'his's. _And_ you can decide if Zach is just in the Loony Bin, or if he's dead. I wasn't aiming for dead, but I just reread it and it totally screams 'ZACH IS DEAD! WAAAAH!' It's basically reader's choice here. And, BTWz, I am not normally this angsty! I usually have very normal angst-levels! But I guess Zach just brings it out... Ahh, Zangst.


End file.
